by Liam Pieper
‘Buy us a beer!’ one said to his mate.
‘Nahcunt. S’your fucking round.’
‘Yeah, but nah, I got the last one. Don’t be such a fucking Jew.’
‘Excuse me.’ Adam found himself addressing them before he’d thought it through. ‘Sorry to bother you, but what the fuck did you just say?’
After they bounced him out of the bar Adam was dismayed to find that not only was he shaken, he was literally shaking. He’d walked into the fight filled with righteous fire, pushed one of the bogans and swung at the other, and then suddenly found himself bent over in agony. A bouncer had appeared from nowhere to twist his hand behind his back at an angle that threatened to wrench it out of the wrist joint completely. He’d found himself leaning into the pain, his body obeying the screaming tendons rather than his brain, and allowed himself be dragged out of the pub, onto the road, and dumped gasping in the gutter, where he’d scrambled away in the manner, he realised looking back on it, of a coward.
He checked his watch, and, seeing he still had hours to wait, wandered down the street and came across a massage parlour, with teenaged touts in short shorts lounging out the front. He stood in front of them, smiling at them, a little tipsy, prevaricating.
He had a thing for Asian women. Something about them drove him crazy, most likely that they were out of his reach. He had a way with a certain kind of woman: those who had grown up with enough money that they appreciated its importance, but poor enough that their parents often fought about it. If her father was angry, distracted and disappointed by the world, and the fading beauty of his ageing wife, all the better. When he was growing up, almost every girl he knew had some iteration of this childhood, and it created certain faultlines in their character, existential tremors that, through a combination of flattery and passive aggression, he had learned to exploit. He had an instinctive ability to spot in a crowd, a group, a party, the woman whose past meant her standards for decent treatment from men would be way too low to put up any decent defence against him.
The Asian girls, however, were closed to him. They were from a different culture, implacable in the way they met his stares, somehow challenging without acknowledging that they’d seen him watching them. He did not know where the cracks in their bravado lay, where the scars in their egos were; they would never be his. For this reason, perhaps, he found himself gravitating towards them when letting his fantasies out for a walk.
He paid for an hour at reception and was shown through to a dimly lit studio and left to undress and lie down on the table. He slid his shirt and jeans off, then removed his watch, the much battered self-winding Rolex his grandfather had smuggled from Europe and gifted to him when he took over the reins of the company, and took a shower, sluicing the sweat and anger off his body. Then he heaved himself up onto the massage table, lay down on his stomach, willed himself to relax. He soon grew impatient with the soothing music being piped into the room, though, and was even less impressed when a beautiful Balinese girl entered and gave him a competent, professional massage.
If he was being honest with himself, he would have admitted that he didn’t actually like massages – what he liked was the hand relief that came at the end – so he found that when he grew excited moments into the massage and the masseuse just ignored the elephant in the room as the hour went on, he became increasingly annoyed and uncomfortable.
This cruelty was exacerbated by the way she found every worn-out joint and tension knot in his body like she was reciting a litany of ways his youth had deserted him.
Parts of him he’d thought evergreen screamed in protest, and there was an especially angry cry from his recently manhandled arm. When he turned over and the masseuse started working his upper torso, he realised that the hard-won pectorals that rippled under his singlet when doing bench presses and chest flies in the gym turned out to be, on closer inspection, just fatty steaks that slid unsettlingly under his skin. At the touch of her disinterested, utilitarian fingers, his erection wilted, along with his mood.
He walked out of the parlour and flagged down a taxi to take him back to Denpasar and an aeroplane that would return him to his family, and it was only as he was lining up to board that he realised he’d left his grandfather’s watch in the shower. It was still there, thank God, waiting for him after a mad dash back through peak-hour traffic. When he got back to the airport, his plane was delayed, miraculously, and he clambered on, finally enjoying a little bit of luck, settled into his seat and went to sleep, his luggage, still holding his phone, safely tucked away in the cargo hold beneath him.
__________
Adam’s phone rang out, and then again, and then again. Tess left a voicemail. ‘Where are you? You have to come home, you have to come home right now.’ An hour passed, and another, and still no answer. She left another message. ‘Arkady is sick, and I don’t know what to do,’ she snapped, half into the phone, half at herself.
She tried her own family: none of them answered. She left messages. She swore, cursed the fuckers rotten and blue, out loud at first, then silently, when she realised that she was disturbing Arkady. After his fit in the showroom she had taken him home, put him to bed. She did not know what else to do.
Every so often her hand reached for the phone to call an ambulance, but stopped. Her gut told her that if he went into the hospital he would not come out.
Instead, she sat by his bedside and spent a long time watching over him, scared and helpless. Angry as well, suddenly angrier than she could ever remember being; searing, incapacitating fury that rose up and clouded over her and made her tear her breath from the air in ragged strips. She could actually see red, which she’d always thought was a figure of speech, but no, a red mist drew down over her vision from the top of her eyes like a television losing reception, and she realised, firstly, that she had no idea where her husband was, where even in the world he was, or what he was doing, although she was sure that whatever it was would be foolish; and secondly, that she hated him, really hated him, with all she had. This was not what she had signed up for.
Tess had known not long after her wedding that anyone who claimed marriage was about compromise was an idiot. It was about endurance. Tess had known before most of her contemporaries that marriage was, for most people, the art of wilful blindness.
Much, probably most, of what Adam did drove her crazy. The way he ate like a homeless kitten, mouth open, molars gnashing and jaw clicking. That he drove the company, and, by extension, her life, like a stolen car, careering wildly in all directions, leaving a string of broken promises, initiatives and employees for her to clean up. The fact that he was profoundly, existentially selfish, to the extent where she wasn’t quite sure he understood that other people were people, with lives and worries of their own, and not inanimate playthings to be worn out and discarded.
For all these years, whenever she thought she’d reached the limit of tolerating Adam’s boorishness and ineptitude, he would blindside her with uncharacteristic sweetness: a gift, or reservations at her favourite restaurant for her and a friend, or, rarest of all, an apology, and an acknowledgement that she’d been right in some fight he’d picked over their clashing management styles.
The longer she sat now, though, the clearer things seemed to become for her. She’d gone into marriage with her expectations carefully managed. She had known it wouldn’t be easy; she could not have imagined it would be so hard. Or that the best part wouldn’t be her husband at all, but her unexpected bond with her grandfather-in-law. He was the first person she’d ever known who cared more about her than himself, a facet of humanity that, until she’d experienced it, she’d never even known she needed.
She kissed Arkady on the forehead, felt the cracks in her lips graze the rice-paper folds of his skin, and turned the lamp off to go downstairs. The lights in Adam’s home office were automatic and switched on as she walked in. There must be, she surmised, some clue here that would help locate him; a hotel booking, a business card. It was imperati
ve that Adam was here for Arkady, but she could find no trace of him. His emails were locked, his social media accounts strangely neglected. Normally he could not go more than a couple of hours without checking in on Facebook or Instagram. With mounting gloom, she fossicked through his desk drawers, his shoulder bag and, finally, his leather jacket, which was draped over the back of his chair.
She checked the side pockets, smoothing out crumpled receipts hoping they would shed some light on where Adam had disappeared to, but nothing: fast-food receipts and petrol station dockets. Adam’s clothes were anathema for laundry, his pockets always full of forgotten things; no matter how carefully she checked, there was always a clandestine tissue that covered everything in fine white schmutz. She reached into the inside pocket of Adam’s jacket and retrieved a crumpled-up ball of paper, which she folded open and smoothed out on the desk to reveal a photo. Here was Adam, with a schoolgirl.
‘Oh.’
Tess could remember the happiest moment in her marriage, in her life, could pinpoint exactly where it was and when. The night they’d brought little Kade home from hospital, she and Adam had placed the baby down in his cot and stood, frozen, side by side and watched him sleep. The gloom was cut by a single beam of light shining in from down the hall and there was no way to tell how much time had passed, and no need to.
Without a word they’d stood over him for hours on end, murmuring to each other about the features inherited from this long-lost relative or the other, marvelling at his tiny fists, the almost invisible rise and fall of his chest. That night, that dreamy half-real stretch of time, was the first in her life she understood what it meant to be alive. There had been many more nights like it, even after the exhaustion, stress and despair of actually raising a child had kicked in, but that was still the one perfect moment she’d had, and was, really, more than she had ever expected from her life. That was the memory that remained perfect and untouched, no matter how many times she took it out to polish it and make sure it still shone.
Tonight, watching her grandfather-in-law fade was a neat bookend to that. Where she’d felt her son’s potential growing and stirring while she watched, she could see Arkady slipping away, and the feeling it shook out of her was helplessness.
Once when she was little, before her parents’ divorce, her family had spent Christmas at their beach house near Sorrento. It had been a strange, gothic summer, the days stifling and the nights freezing, the air thick and sullen. She remembered her parents as brooding, silent presences that became angry whispers though the thin walls after dark.
Their troubles with money were starting to pick at the edges of their marriage, and while she was too young to understand that, she knew enough to keep out of their way. Her big brother, on the other hand, was old enough to see what was coming, but still young enough to take it out on her, and she’d quickly learned to avoid him as well, and the Chinese burns and dead legs he dealt out whenever he caught her.
Most of the time she hid from him by playing quietly in the garden, where dry fountains and concrete statues were overgrown with ivy, and an ancient tennis court had given over to saltbush and weeds. She’d found a four-leaf clover in a patch growing through the sand and had been absorbed in a search for more, nose pressed to the lawn, and hadn’t noticed her brother sneaking up on her until he jumped out, startling her.
‘Pete!’ she screamed, swiping at him while he laughed and danced back. ‘Don’t be a dickhead!’ His laugh faded into a smile and he held up his hands, signalling a truce.
‘Come,’ he told her. ‘I want to show you something.’
She followed reluctantly as he led her past the tennis courts, to the back of the garden where the property ended with a clump of vines and torn chicken wire. Pete pulled back some vines to reveal a hole cut through the fencing, nodded for her to go ahead, then led her through a forest of stunted gums that gave way to parched saltbush and finally to a path leading to the edge of a cliff, high up on the bluff of Sullivan Bay. There, past the hollows and dunes where the wind blew the sand up into drifted banks, the ground stopped abruptly at a limestone cliff. By inching carefully forward, she could stand and see where the water lapped against the rocks below. Her brother pointed down and urged her to look.
‘At what? It’s just water.’
‘Can’t you see it? Look closer.’
She glared suspiciously back at him, then inched a little further out, so that her toes crept over the cliff and held fast like a monkey’s, then leaned out over the precipice. Looking straight down into the ocean she could see nothing but blue; but then, as she watched, the turquoise faded into a darker blue, then a blue-grey, then all at once a huge creature, a giant flat arrowhead trailing a dragon’s tail, glided up to the surface, turned a lazy circle and dived again. She shrieked and jumped back.
‘What was that?’
‘Stingray!’ Pete boasted knowingly. ‘Giant stingray.’
‘Wow!’ She was thrilled, her mood spiking, her heart rattling her rib cage, the horror of the family holiday forgotten. ‘What’s it doing there?’ She leaned back to try to spot it again. ‘What does it want?’
‘Oh,’ her brother said in the tone of a schoolteacher, moving beside her so they both stood on the edge of the cliff, the skin of their arms brushing, ‘they live deep at the bottom of the ocean, and only come in to the shallows to feed.’
‘On what?’
‘Oh, you know . . .’ Pete said airily, ‘fish, octopuses . . . little girls!’ As he said the last words he grabbed her, suddenly, by each shoulder and shoved her hard out over the void, her neck whiplashing back painfully, his hands holding her half out over the water while he laughed. ‘Don’t fall in!’ he implored her in a singsong voice. ‘It’s a long way down!’ After a few seconds he pulled her back and tossed her to the safety of the ground, then wandered off screaming with laughter, wiping happy tears from his eyes.
She’d stayed crying in the scrub all afternoon. Her bladder had betrayed her while she was dangling out over the water, and she’d stripped her ruined underpants off and buried them in the sand dunes so her parents would never know she’d wet herself and turn their anger onto her. There was shame, but also the start of a lifelong habit of stoicism in the face of others’ selfishness. She would be better, always better, than those who let her down. Quietly, without making a fuss about it, she would be stronger, work harder, be nicer than everyone else. She would wage a cold war against the world; icy calm in the face of her brother’s, and others’, cruelty. For hate’s sake, she would become a better person than they could ever be.
And then, decades later, she’d met Arkady, whose heart was just like hers, and watching him fade now, she thought about that day at the bay, the stingray, the horrors that lurk under still water. Every time he opened his eyes, they swivelled around to find her. She could not fathom what his thoughts were, or even if he still had any. His blue eyes had never missed much but they were clouded now, and looking into them as they rolled around and focused on her, she wasn’t sure there was anything left behind them at all.
She thought back to one of the first times they’d gone to lunch together, back in the early days when he was taking her through the laborious process of sourcing the parts for the Mitty and Sarah dolls from around the world.
‘You know,’ she’d told him, ‘I used to play with a Sarah doll when I was a little girl. I used to wonder where she’d come from, but I never imagined it was so complicated.’
‘Where did you think they came from?’ he asked her, his eyes twinkling.
‘I’m not sure. I guess I just assumed they’d always been around.’
Arkady laughed then. ‘In a way, in a way. I’m not a young man, you know.’
Tess smiled, and asked, ‘Why Mitty and Sarah? Where did you get those names?’
Arkady went suddenly quiet, his eyes stopped shining, he grew sombre. ‘Well, Mitty is short for mitzvah, which is a Hebrew word that means a good deed for God.’
‘And S
arah?’
‘Well, Sarah.’ Arkady took a long time to answer, chewed his food slowly, had a long swallow of wine. ‘Sarah means princess. I knew a girl once, Sarah, and the doll was a little version of her. Little princess Sarah.’
Arkady’s breathing, which had been ragged, was now so slow she had to keep lowering her ear to his mouth to assure herself that it hadn’t finished altogether. She laid her head next to his lips so they almost touched and she just barely heard him whisper her name.
‘I’m here, Arkady,’ she said.
Arkady made a wet hacking sound, and his tongue slid out of his mouth as he grappled for the words. ‘Adam?’ His eyes opened and rolled slowly over to Tess, who didn’t know what to say. Arkady saw that she was stricken and let out a sob, then whispered in horror, ‘He knows.’ A tear rolled down his face. ‘He knows. He found out.’
‘He found out what? Who found out?’ Tess reached out to wipe his tears away and said the first thing that came to her mind that might put him at ease.
‘Do you mean Adam? And the money? He doesn’t know about the money, Arkady. Nobody does. I won’t tell anyone your secret. Nobody knows a thing. It’s okay.’
‘Oh, thank God.’ Arkady smiled, reassured. ‘He must never know. We didn’t know. It all made sense back then. We weren’t to know.’ He mumbled something in German, and looked at Tess again. The fog burned off then, and inside the collapsed mess of his face, his eyes burned fiercely. ‘You must never tell him. Promise me.’
‘I promise.’
‘Look after him. He cannot do it by himself. He is not like us. You must protect him.’
Tess had smiled and nodded. ‘It’s okay, Arkady. Hush. Try to sleep.’ The old man sighed and relaxed, and he slept.